Carlos Diogo Homepage

Hello there

If you are looking for someone that likes challenges and that through his professional life is known to deliver fast results let me introduce myself because I’m that kind of person.

Of particular interest to your company:

o I have demonstrated my strategic ability through successfully launching projects both new processes and IT tools.

o I have consistently contributed my It skills to advise management on the implementation of new process or tools.

o Several times I found solutions for difficult problems unsolved by other teams.

o Time and again, my initiatives have resulted in increased of efficiency and transparency on multiple Business areas.

o My innovation skills go much further then just Business Intelligence and Supply Chain IT. I successfully designed innovative architectures and solutions for other areas as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), E-commerce, Data-Mining, Web Marketing etc

I’m sure your company has challenges that can motivate me to exceed myself, learn something new and deliver innovative solutions to your problems.

I’ll be waiting for your contact

Sincerely,

Carlos Diogo

As of this February my career took an unexpect turn moving away from Supply Chain and towards Business Intelligence.

Business Intelligence is said to be on this decade what the ERPs were for the last one. The next big thing. Competitive advantage comes when you spot trends, risks and opportunities ahead of the competition. In most cases the information that would allow you such goal is produced , gathered and made available in the company IT. A good BI infrastructure will allow the right information to be made on the right time to person so that the decisions are made.

The current Infineon BI technologies platform range from Oracle to SQL Server Databases backend and Business Objects to MS SQL Analysis Services. This multitude of platforms and the fact that i have to work in most of them have increased significantly my know how in PL/SQL, Business Objects and Sharepoint Reporting Services. Furthermore it also gave me a very good foundation on Data Warehouse Architecture, Development and Operations.

After three months of part-time development of functionalities and inclusion of new providers the The VoipRateTracker is project completed all its major objectives. The last milestone, the alert of changes via mail functionality has become recently available for all registered users. This functionality will be further developed to also alert on the event of provider addition for instance.
The project will now focus on finalizing details in functionalities and the inclusion of more providers. Also from the technology of the data extracters will be covered as i expect to make the shift from PHP to Phyton as development language. This should solve some issues i had when trying to include some providers that due to the amount of data were causing memory and server load problems.
The traffic of the site has been growing steadly and to my very good surprise the users tend to return to the site very often. The search engine traffic is also increasing steadily week after week. Recently we have entered the Facebook and Hi5.

In the last couple of months i had to change some parts of my life in order to reduce expenses. One of the critical points was that contact with the family back home using Skype (sometimes SkypeOut) was still a bit expensive , specially calling mobiles.
Some months ago a friend pointed some other VOIP providers, in special VoipBuster. The problem was that when i decided to look on the internet for the best provider for my needs it was a bit complicated. The providers have very different rates , for instance some offer the landlines calls but have more expensive mobiles calls. This process of choosing the best provider was very time consuming. Furthermore it came to my attention that this providers write in very tiny letters that they may and probably will change their rates without previous notice to its customers.
An idea for a project was then born. To create a site where the user could easily find the best provider for his needs and be informed of the rate changes. The VoipRateTracker was born.
Currently in Beta stage the functionalities are being added on daily bases. Currently most of the providers listed are from the group Betamax that controls about 30 different providers. Also the current focus is providers with pre-paid service and not contract services. With time new providers will be added as well as the alert functionality. So now you know, save on your national and international calls, visit VoipRateTracker.com.

As of April 2009  and after analysing the current market situation i decided that was time to embrace a new, but at the same time old, challenge which is to finally learn the German language.

My basic understanding of German were during this seven years already in Germany enough since i hardly ever needed it for working as most of my friends either were foreigners or spoke English.

However , in todays market situation basic german was no longer enough as therefore i decided to go back , do intensive german classes and finally learn the language.

After some time spent looking for the right place i have found a quite good school that offer a very good service for the money spent and are extremely frendly.  Situated in the Schwabing area the Tandem school besides extremly competent teachers also offers extra curricular activities specialy interesting for those who are new to the city or country.

I have picked up at the final of the level A2 and decided to do both B1 and B2. This represents over 4 months of daily 9:30 to 13h classes. I honestly think that i did not had so many classes since the highschool.

I expect with this to be able to work and communicate in german because then i will be able to improve on my own.

 Workfow tools are essential to easily model any business process.  Workflow tools avoid document templates and endless email exchanges between the parties of a process. 

After several days of browsing over different tools available on the market i came across the ProcessMaker application. 

Besides being OpenSource which is a big plus it also offer lots of functionalities, a user interface that is quite friendly and additionally quite complete documentation.

From the installation to the configuration and creation of a first test workflow it takes about one hour. The installer creates its own application stack including Apache server and MySql Database server. The configuration is also extremly simple , having the administrator just to create some users and usergroups.

The User interface is very powerful and quite simple to use. However it may not work very well with all browsers. Following the tutorials that come with the product and going through the examples that can be installed very easly we can quickly have a overview of the potential of the application.

For the Business model that i was trying to implement there was just one minor problem. In a work flow a task could only be assigned to a single user instead to a group where all member could eventually take action.  This can be worked arround by creating distribution list emails corresponding to the groups but it is not very clean and may be very complicated when several BP run on the tool with different user groups and roles that are overlapping or not.  

The design team of the project seemed very active and continually improve their product. For instance a solution for the problem i described above was planned for a next release)

Overall this is a platform to keep in mind.

In order to improve the sustainability of the company by the end of the year 2007, we decided to move the focus from the Baratix comparison engine and  offer services on the web marketing area. By then we have had some very profitable mailing campaigns and therefore it was considered to be the logic step. 

If initially the strategy was to offer the services as a complement of a site building or web presence management package soon we realized that building sites was not profitable and we should leave that to other companies. Adclick had positioned it self as a Lead creator and manager using the several channels available . 

The most effective channel was the mailing. Mailing was a simple, fast and cheap way of generating leads. However over time this proved to be tricky and even problematic as often the emails were considered spam and soon our ips and domains were blacklisted , limiting our mail sending capabilities.

This problem caused us to focus more on the other cannels specialy Search Engine Optimization , Adwords optimization and Afilliation networks. By the end of the year 2008 the results were within the aceptable range.

If the results of 2008 were ok for me , the strategy the majority decided to pursue, did not meet my expectations and therefore on the beginning of 2009 i decided to sell my participation on the company.

After almost one year and a half of being part of the implementation and later steering the development of the long term planning solution, probably due to the good results achieved, my quick learning capabilities and my good relation with the business counterpart i was invited to step up and become Solution Architect for the Supply Chain.

As Solution Architect i’m responsible for new business models implementation over the Application landscape. Besides i was asked to improve the existing functionality of the several applications in order to bettre serve business needs.

The SC landscape is basically composed of a Demand forecasting environment based on thh I2 DMAN solution, and inventory optimizer application also from I2,  two Supply planning environments (one with focus on short term operations with weekly cycles and the other with a focus on long term procurement and strategy) and two scheduling and promise applications ( I2 Factory planner for the locations with make to stock products and SAP APO PP/DS for the make to order location) running locally on the factories. Additionally APO DP is also implemented to support the global and regional sales allocation process.

During the period at this role i can distinguish two phases. During the first year the focus was simplification and tuning of the platform to achieve better performance and business satisfaction. Later the focus was downsizing and trimming of the platform to the essential functions in order to cut costs.

The role provide me the chance to extend my understanding of SCM from my original focus on Capacity and Long term planning and become familiar with other processes and business models.

On January 2007 me a three other persons created the start-up Adclick lda. How idea was to implement a price comparison website for the Portuguese retail market.

Price comparison websites where booming in other countries like US , UK and Germany and in Portugal there was still no players.  The time seemed right as online retail stores were being created daily and the stores would have the need a ground to compete with the established big retailers.

Our original focus was the Electronics and Computers market. The reasons was the amount of stores that already existed online that would cause stores to pay for customer, the fact that this were standard products which would reduce the technological effort into mapping the products from the stores  and the fact that these goods were typically the ones that the consumer would buy online.

The first stage was to analyze existing  shop comparison engines in different country and design the core comparison engine.

The sourcing of the data for the comparison was through web-parsers that would retrieve the product information from the stores websites and store it on and defined format. The web-parser technology we used had been previously developed by me for a previous project and offered reliable results. The second phase of the project was the design of the back-office platform that would manage the web-parsers and then work on the data to serve the comparison engine.

My role in the project was deeply involved on the design as the development was made by another member of the team.

The comparison engine was set to productive on October 2007 and by the end of the year the results were bad. We where not been able to either generate traffic to the site and also we were not able to convince the stores to spend money on us.

I joined Qimonda AG It department on January 2006. The company was starting a project to replace the entire supply chain landscape of legacy processes  and applications by a industry standards. The selected platform was I2 SCM solutions and i joined the team responsible for implementing the long term , Sales and Operation supply chain planning solution that would support the monthly VRFC  (volume rolling forecast) process.

The solution was based on a global model of the company supply chain and a linear solver to plan and optimize the supply over 18months, having as inputs the demand and capacity forecast, product information and parameters and a set of guidelines (objectives)

This objectives are extremely important and define the business model of the company.  Also, due to the nature of the linear solver (objectives are optimized sequentially) the selection and correctly tuning of them has major impact of the final plan. As example , if we would set ‘minimize stock’ as top priority , most likely nothing would be produced because usually there is no demand for low quality products that are co-products of the high grade stock and always cause stock.

This understanding of the solver/model/objective behaviour was my task on the project team. While the rest of the team was focuses on the final model,  i was simulating with a smaller model and testing different setups.  it was a hands on training as no coaching was provided.  Looking at unexpected results and finding what was the cause for it was my daily work , to which my strong analytical capacities were extremely helpful.

Furthermore, and in order to help my analysis i created the backbone of the reporting and analysis platform. The end user was always very important for me and  i trained the end users on technics and processes to analyse the results  that i had developed.

During the project, as i was the person that best understood the behavior of the solver and could predict the results, i laso became the bridge between the business community and the technical team, translating the business expectations into design changes/adjustments.

Our project was a success and that contrasted with the other projects of the program, and the difference was not the technical part that was very similar within the program. The reason was the close contact that i had established with the business users that allowed us to make the small adjustments that made a big difference,  a solid analysis platform and technical  that allowed the users to quickly understand the cause of unexpected results.

This great results i achieved, together with the trust relation i developed with the business community led me to my next challenge.